Frontiers in Psychology 01 frontiersin.org
Designing narratives and data
visuals in comic form for social
influence in climate action
Ray LC
1
*, ZijingSong
1
, YatingSun
2
and ChengYang
1
1
School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, Kowloon, Hong Kong SAR, China,
2
Academy of Art University, San Francisco, CA, United States
Climate change is dicult to connect with personally, because people
only regard the phenomenon as important if it becomes a perceived threat
to themselves. Arguments like statistics and policy debates are extrinsic
motivators, which do not necessarily align people’s own intrinsic motives
with those of climate action. Instead, narratives and visual communication
can influence viewers implicitly by the way they show and reinforce actions
and thoughts that align with climate action. In this design study, we used
comics created for human-level climate change influence to promote ideas
like future-based thinking, sharing of responsibility, and caring for each other.
We also created data visuals that illustrate future consequences of climate
change for the purpose of averting negative alternative realities. To see
whether our design can aect audience perception of climate change on the
human level of goals and desires, weshowed the comics to readers unfamiliar
with the themes of the stories, presenting them as manga about characters
and situations. The survey showed that data stories can aect the way naive
readers interpret narratives to align with pro-climate attitudes such as sharing
and future-vision, and that readers are focused on the human-level of the data
and story as opposed to the physical resource level. Speculative fiction and
data visuals provide a potentially eective way to influence individuals’ climate
change attitudes by showing alternative realities and attributes of collective
responsibility and planning-for-the-future as data stories.
KEYWORDS
design fiction, data comics, climate action, data narratives, data visuals
Introduction
Climate change is a major crisis of our generation, but public perception of it depends
on factors like individual habits, socioeconomic demographics, political ideology (Weber,
2016), socio-political motivation (Luo and Zhao, 2019), psychological distance (Wang etal.,
2019), personal relevance (Arıkan and Günay, 2021), and many other factors we are
beginning to unravel. In particular, it can bedicult to change the mindset of even climate-
conscious communities who are skeptical and apathetic about climate change. is
skepticism comes from xed attitudinal positions, skeptical voices in public media, lack of
trust in decision-makers, lack of support for personal beliefs, etc. (Happer and Philo, 2016).
TYPE Brief Research Report
PUBLISHED 27 September 2022
DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.893181
OPEN ACCESS
EDITED BY
Katharina Groß-Vogt,
University of Music and Performing Arts
Graz, Austria
REVIEWED BY
Gheorghe Popescu,
Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University,
Romania
Piero Morseletto,
VU Amsterdam,
Netherlands
*CORRESPONDENCE
Ray LC
lc@raylc.org
SPECIALTY SECTION
This article was submitted to
Human-Media Interaction,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Psychology
RECEIVED 10 March 2022
ACCEPTED 01 September 2022
PUBLISHED 27 September 2022
CITATION
LC R, Song Z, Sun Y and Yang C (2022)
Designing narratives and data visuals in
comic form for social influence in climate
action.
Front. Psychol. 13:893181.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.893181
COPYRIGHT
© 2022 LC, Song, Sun and Yang. This is an
open-access article distributed under the
terms of the Creative Commons Attribution
License (CC BY). The use, distribution or
reproduction in other forums is permitted,
provided the original author(s) and the
copyright owner(s) are credited and that
the original publication in this journal is
cited, in accordance with accepted
academic practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does not
comply with these terms.
LC et al. 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.893181
Frontiers in Psychology 02 frontiersin.org
Climate communication strategies that use more personal
strategies like storytelling and visual communication, on the other
hand, are suitable for developing pro-environmental behaviors
and attitudes (Boyko, 2019). ese long-term behaviors for
social good need to activate intrinsic motivations, which can
develop when experiencing narratives aligned with particular
social purposes (Lc and Mizuno, 2021). Wetherefore employ the
genre of data comics (Bach et al., 2017), which combines
speculative design of ction (Dunne and Raby, 2013) and data
visuals in the form of more-understandable and non-threatening
comics to create more appealing and persuasive narratives,
magazine styles, annotated story-based data charts, partitioned
poster, and comic strips styles for the purposes of climate inuence.
On the physical level, climate change is connected to a set of
phenomena like material consumption, natural resource
exploitation, increases in population, and lack of policies in
sustainability. ese issues depend on policy debates that are
related to people ‘s pre-existing environmental attitude (Taube
etal., 2021). Instead of working at the physical level, weintend to
intervene at the human level, addressing phenomena like
immediate gratication, human myopia, taking comfort in
ignorance, belief in lack of individual inuence, and desensitized
negative outcomes. To promote long-term behaviors that align
with climate awareness using visual communication, weuse the
medium of comics, which have broad appeal to capture even
climate skeptics attention without appearing to preach about
climate change. Weuse data communication methods embedded
in the comic to diuse the diculty of the topic and reduce the
negative reaction to scientic content, using speculative data
visuals to narrate possible realities designed to provoke thinking
about consequences of individual actions and alignment of
intrinsic motivations with social goals for positive climate action.
In applying story design and data visuals for climate
persuasion, werecognize the importance of audience perception
to the design process. To help us understand (1) how story
structures and visuals may improve awareness of climate issues on
the level of goals and motivations, and (2) how particular data
comic interpretations can potentially lead to more eective climate
communication, weconducted a survey study of 60 readers to
assess the type of information they reported learned from reading,
providing feedback for improving the design process. Public
opinion on topics of a political disposition are subject to only
long-term changes (Sears and Funk, 1999), and such ingrained
opinions as climate change (Howe et al., 2019) would not
beexpected to change with a single reading. us welimit our
scope to illuminating a novel design strategy of narrative and
visual intervention with potential ways for improving the way the
public can perceive climate issues in the future to align with their
own intrinsic motives.
Data comics may bemore eective than other data-driven
storytelling formats to make data-driven stories accessible and
understandable, because the audience will be more engaging,
enjoyable and comics are ecient to highlight temporal
information or distributions (Wang, 2022). However, this
research did not focus on studying whether data comics have the
potential to create awareness and inuence attitudes among
audiences. In one study that used a comic book about rape
victims in India as a research object, respondents believed that
the comic can deliver a powerful social message to create issue-
awareness among younger audiences (Chattopadhyay, 2019).
Given the relative lack of studies in how climate communication
based on narrative and visuals strategies are perceived by naive
audiences, weaimed to investigate how people interpret climate
comics designed to inuence interpretation:
RQ1: How can speculative data comics aect audience
perception in terms of telling stories that align with particular
climate-positive goals or rather with education on resources
and policy?
RQ2: What can welearn from the way people interpret data
comics designed to inuence pro-climate action, in order to
create eective climate action communication?
Background
The connection between climate change
attitude and risk perception
e policies, attitudes, and capabilities of various countries in
supporting sustainability provides both opportunities and
challenges for enacting positive environmental change. At present,
worldwide interest has been devoted to energy use, the
proliferation of renewable energy, and the employment of
information technologies (Harrower, 2020). However, some
environmentally friendly policies do not always make positive
impacts. For example, carbon taxes may not have impact on
consumer energy decisions, but would aect the steadiness of the
nancial system because of the decline in fossil fuel production
and use (Ionescu, 2021a,b). Meanwhile, the pandemic inevitably
increases the use of plastics, due to discarded products like
disposable masks, gloves, and sanitizer bottles. Whereas a study
recommends approaches like increasing the recyclability of
plastics, using bioplastics, and developing new public-private
partnerships, the public should also have an appropriate
appreciation for the critical role the plastic sectors play (De Blasio
and Fallon, 2022). Environment innovation and green nance are
important drivers of sustainable development (Ionescu, 2021a,b).
us, raising public awareness of environmental protection, and
increasing green nancial support for sustainable energy systems
are needed for climate change mitigation.
Design fiction as climate communication
Design ction is a strategy for narrating potential futures by
varying a particular premise (Blythe, 2017), considering potential
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futures within social and cultural narratives (Bleecker, 2009).
Design ction can provide a narrative strategy for social inuence
by showing the eects of alternative visions (Moezzi etal., 2017).
Evidence suggests that narratives can strengthen the attitude-
behavior relationship (Rhodes etal., 2016), so reading ction may
help activate pro-environmental behavior in individuals who
already have strong pro-environmental attitudes. Research shows
that climate ction leads to greater public comprehension of
negative consequences caused by climate changes compared with
reading about research (Moser, 2016). Other research points out
that there is no strong evidence to show climate storytelling is
more persuasive than communicating evidence in real life (Jones,
2014). ey do not account, however, for ction purposely
designed for positive persuasion for actions that can contribute to
positive climate action as opposed to seeing negative eects of
climate change.
Comics and visualization in climate
communication
In scientic communication, illustrations play signicant
roles as visual explanations (Schreiner, 1997) that reect the
structure of the concept presented (Farinella, 2018). As
scholarly interest in visualization of climate change increases,
climate visual imagery has been used in television, lms,
advertisements, and artworks for visualizing past and present
climate states, and inspiring imagination about future states
(O’Neill and Smith, 2014). In addition, case studies indicate
that graphics can reduce climate dynamics to the human level
and put climate change action on the same level as the risks
people are willing to assume for a better life (Walsh, 2015). Such
visual communication, reected in the comic, has the potential
to convey the complexity of reality despite being more accessible
and widely available to the public (Darnhofer, 2018). Some
researchers found that science comics have the potential to
cultivate a continuing interest for the general public to learn
science (Lin etal., 2015). Narrative transportation positively
inuences the eect for hero characters, which extant research
demonstrates indirectly inuences the persuasiveness of a story
(Jones, 2014). Moreover, comics support contextual storytelling
based on aspect transitions that convey mood and sense of
place, allowing for implicit inuence through environmental
design as opposed to explicit forms of narrative inuence
(McCloud, 1994).
For the scope of this work, we focus exclusively on the
sub-genre of science comics, broadly dened as “comics which
have as one of their main aims to communicate science or to
educate the reader about some non-ctional, scientic concept or
theme” (Tatalovic, 2009). e scientic comic may enable a wide
audience of non-specialist individuals, who do not typically seek
out science information, to engage with science related topics,
thus focusing scientic literature” to something the public can
understand intuitively (Spiegel etal., 2013).
Speculative data visuals and data comics
Research has been directed at creating data visuals that aect
viewers’ attitudes (Sheppard, 2005; Ballantyne, 2018). For example,
through the analysis of two climate diagrams, “trac light” and
planetary boundaries” (Morseletto, 2017), “understandable,
meaningful and engaging” concepts in environmental science have
been presented. ese visuals encourage visual thinking, make data
and information expressive, help viewers recongure thoughts, and
facilitate communication with policy makers. Speculative design in
this form allows for a discussion of possible future states (Dunne
and Raby, 2013). us, viewers may reimagine thought-provoking
questions through visual examination, and the data wepresent
becomes “stories” connected to public awareness (Kim and DiSalvo,
2010). erefore, combining the inuences of design ction and
speculative data visuals may create more eective climate change
communication in a narratively persuasive form.
Dierent genres work better for dierent story types.
Choosing the appropriate genre depends on the complexity of the
data and the intended audience. Business presentations typically
use slide shows instead of comic strips, while television
commercials use videos instead of ow charts (Segel and Heer,
2010). Data comics combine the merits from other visual
storytelling genres that provide both the immersiveness of videos
and the interactive features of infographics (Wang, 2022).
Moreover, data comics utilize narrative concepts and visual
information of traditional comics to express data-related insights
designed to communicate complex scientic ideas (Wang etal.,
2019). us, wedeveloped data comics to express the narrative
aspects of identifying with climate action, transferring traditional
patterns of infographics presentation to narrative forms for
particular social purposes.
Methods: Narrative design
Story and headline writing
We rst specied particular design goals for climate change
action. ese goals are not related to physical resource arguments
like overconsumption or resource destruction, but rather human
psychological phenomena that weaddress here using persuasive
inuence. e phenomena wedesign against include issues like
immediate gratication, myopic vision over the consequences of
destructive action, the idea that an individual’s eect does not
matter to global issues, the idea that theres comfort in ignorance
regarding scientic issues, etc. Since this research aims to reach
general audiences and audiences who may be climate change
skeptics, climate issues are not directly mentioned in the stories.
e work may beread covertly as simple a comic rather than a form
of climate ction. e titles of the stories also reect subtle cues
such as Redemption Park, New Revolia, and Every Flash of Light Is
the Sun of Another World, all of which evoke themes of rebirth,
community responsibility, and learning from an experience.
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FIGURE1
Persuasion through visual design in Sonia McDougal.
Comic design
We designed ve stories to address dierent human
phenomena propagating climate change. For example, one story
is Sonia McDougal, based on the story structure of “Rebirth” and
designed to dispel the idea of maximizing immediate gains over
future considerations. Wetake the typical elements of the tragedy
and turn the story plot into a more positive one in which the main
character is forced to change their ways and become a better
individual. e protagonists of this plot usually have redeeming
qualities to show that they deserve a happy ending. Like the
tragedy, the protagonist usually gets caught up in darkness and
deals with the threat growing in similar stages to the tragedy plot,
seeming almost non-existent at rst before becoming so
prominent it can no longer beignored. However, rather than let
the darkness triumph the protagonist eventually redeems
themselves, negating what would otherwise bea tragic ending
(Booker, 2004).
Sonia McDougal tells the story of a shoe business entrepreneur
named Sonia who must make a decision about her company,
whether to invest in long term research and development, or to
push the product widely to the general public. In her personal life
she takes the approach of immediate needs and gratication, as
opposed to settling down. en aer choosing to maximize prot
in her professional life, the business fails, teaching Sonia an
important lesson in the “Rebirth” theme. She realizes she should
consider a long-term plan and decides to take action in her
personal life, to nally settle down with her boyfriend. e
illustration uses a science ction comic book style which is more
to show the story theme: the yet-to-be-produced shoe which
works in any weather and can predict the rain using electronics.
e science ction look subtly points out a future-directed theme
in comic design, which is espousing future-directed over
immediate-directed lifestyles (Figures1, 2).
Other subtle cues abound in the visual comic. For example, to
show the research and development that involves experimental
shoes that survive in all weather, wedesigned a rain motif found
in several scenes in the story. To show the turning point in Sonias
life aer the business failure, weshowed eyes opened on a mirror
to indicate self-reection, when she was red from the company,
and weused two panels to express the eye moment to express time
ow and actually she stayed in the car awhile before leaving the
company downstairs. And comics panels make the unconnected
moments together, and mentally construct a continuous, unied
reality. So, the audience will use closure as a grammar to
understand the story. Moreover, the shoe business building is
drawn in a diagonal position to indicate failing, followed by eyes
closing, which signals the “Rebirth” structure that also hopes to
change the audiences own viewpoint from immediate needs to
long-term views. ese moments establish the change undergone
by the character using aspect transitions as a way to apply
environmental storytelling to the work (McCloud, 1994). e
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“Rebirth” theme is emphasized in the recurrent scene structures
during Sonias two encounters with her boyfriend (Figure3).
Data visuals in comics
According to Bach et al. (2018), there are five major design
considerations for the purposes of data comics: visualization,
flow, narration, words, and pictures. In Sonia McDougal, one
panel with a graph was added to show the increase in
randomness of day-to-day rainfall, which is used to support
the idea of research and development for future gains of the
company in order to create smart rain-proof shoes (Figure4).
To keep the balance between data and context in our work
while pushing forward the narrative, a distribution map on
typhoon incidence in current and future times was given in
the storytelling line. Note that these are not real data, but
rather attempts to tell the story of future situations using data
as narrative. Hence the speculative data story approach
develops a hypothetical view of the world that then allows the
reader to extrapolate about the consequences of following the
direction of the main character in prioritizing current over
future considerations.
Since comics have the advantage of splitting complex
processes into less complex sections for easy understanding
(Cohn, 2012), they allow viewers to follow complex relationships
and scientic ideas. Two panels in New Revolia are representatives
of this aspect. e rst example is a graphic map that implicitly
explains the main reason for the shipwreck—the melt of glaciers
caused by global warming. In the turning point, a heated
discussion about the social values among two groups of characters
(scientists and bunnies man) occurred and one scientist put
forward a reasonable solution to distribute food equally. e
second example is the way the food distribution plan is visualized
using graphics that not only indicate the idea of the plan, but also
uses the form of the data graph in showing people and their
carbon footprints to narrate the idea of sharing of responsibility
in the context of the story.
FIGURE2
Contextual storytelling by visual design in New Revolia.
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FIGURE3
Using data visuals to describe future scenarios in the context of the narrative in Sonia McDougal.
FIGURE4
Using data visuals in New Revolia to describe strategies for sharing carbon emission responsibilities.
Magazine layout
Research has shown that what the public learns from sources
like school education or newspapers makes them generally believe
they have a good understanding of climate change issues (Pasquaré
and Oppizzi, 2012). us wecreated the comic A4 size newspaper
to mimic the style of a tabloid; A4 is widely used for magazines.
e issue includes 12 pages within which are found 5 stories
(Sonia McDougal, Redemption Park, VO, Every Flash of Light Is the
Sun of Another World, New Revolia). e text fonts are custom-
created to complement the comic-drawing style. In order to help
readers easily understand the content and panels, the designers set
the layout according to the “Z-path,” from le to right and
downward, which is preferred by new comic readers (Cohn,
2013). Since the dierent visual emphases to page layout and panel
composition have the potential to improve the dramatic eects of
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a story or plot, the character panels in every story are zoomed
out and emphasized to help the development of storytelling
(Figure5).
Methods: Reader study
An online survey is conducted to address RQ1, with semi-
structured follow-up questions regarding story-design and
perception to address RQ2 (see “Introduction”). e questionnaire
was divided into demographic information, reactions to Sonia
McDougal, reactions to New Revolia, and self-report of climate
attitudes. First, we collected individual-level variables of
participants (including age groups, gender and educational
background) to besure weget a range of dierent backgrounds,
because some studies found that women are more concerned with
environment than men and the level of education is positively
related to climate change concern (Arıkan and Günay, 2021). Aer
that, participants were asked to read the two comics and answer
several questions related to their understanding and feelings about
story plots, story structures, painting styles, layout, characters,
data visuals and environment graphics. At this point, we ask
people to interpret the comics purely on what the stories they tell
and the data it visualizes, without mentioning the climate action
purpose of comics. Next, we evaluate the eectiveness of the
comics and how readers interpret them in context of climate
change. We adapted previous work (Christensen and Knezek,
2015) for a self-ecacy scale about climate change attitude to
measure how pro-climate each reader is.
Participants were recruited and paid through the online
research platform Prolic (n = 60, 26 males, 33 females, 1
non-binary). e demographics of the participants are shown in
Figure6. Weused R 4.0.3 and RStudio 1.3 to process, analyze, and
plot the data. e participants’ short responses to questions about
interpretation of particular aspects of the story were then coded
using open coding and independently analyzed by two evaluators.
FIGURE5
Layout of Drizzle and design purpose for each story.
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FIGURE7
Quantitative results from survey on 1–7 Likert scale. Sonia.Resource—“How strongly does the Sonia McDougal story contribute to an
understanding of development of resources?” Sonia.Planning—“How strongly does the Sonia McDougal story contribute to an understanding of
prioritizing long term planning?” New.Revolia.Resource—“How strongly does the New Revolia story contribute to an understanding of resource
limitations?” New.Revolia.Sharing—“How strongly does the New Revolia story contribute to an understanding of sharing amongst diverse groups?”
Data.Leads.to.Understanding—“How strongly do the four panels with specific climate change data and facts contribute to your realization of the
urgent situation of climate change?” Encouraged.to.Learn—“How encouraged are youby the data shown in the manga pages to learn about
climate change?” Data.Leads.to.Interest—“How strongly do youthink this data in comics contributes to your interest in climate change evidence?”
Sonia Resource responses dier significantly from Sonia Planning; New Revolia Resource responses dier significantly from New Revolia Sharing
(Wilcoxon ranked sum, p < 0.05).
Results from the coding process are described in section 6.
Participant demographics are provided in Figure6.
Results: Quantitative
In general, participants reported being quite positive about the
way the design of stories and data visuals contributed to learning
about climate change (Data Leads to Understanding, Encouraged
To Learn, Data Leads to Interest in Figure 7). In the Sonia
McDougal story, there is a signicant dierence between the way
people perceived the climate change purpose (median 6, mean
5.6) as opposed to the edication over physical resource level
(median 4, mean 4.3; Wilcoxon ranked sums, p = 6.15e–7),
showing evidence that the story design led readers to consider the
idea of future-directed thinking (the core theme of the story) more
than the physical aspects of climate change. In the New Revolia
story, there was a signicantly higher understanding of the theme
of resource sharing (median 6, mean 5.53) over understanding of
resource limitation (median 5, mean 4.9) resulting from reading
the story (Wilcoxon ranked sums, p= 0.008902), consistent with
the view that the story design led to better understanding of the
human theme of sharing as opposed to teaching about climate
change on the physical level.
e Likert data is shown in Figure7, with the variability of the
data shown in the heatmap in Figure8. Note that variability in the
response to each question set are similar (interquartile ranges in
Sonia Resource, Sonia Planning, New Revolia Sharing, and New
Revolia Resource are all 2; variances in the respective groups are
1.57, 1.91, 2.16, and 2.42, Table 1; Sonia Resource vs. Sonia
Planning F-test; p= 0.8238; New Revolia Sharing vs. New Revolia
Resource, F-test; p= 0.8913).
e positivity about climate change can bedue to the self-
reported support of climate change, for the climate change
attitude scale revealed a general agreement of over 80% above 4
(1–7 scale) in every question in the survey, e.g., “How strongly do
FIGURE6
Demographic background in the survey study (N = 60, female = 33, male = 26, nonbinary = 1) broken down by Gender (left), Age Group (middle), and
Education Obtained (right).
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youbelieve the facts and data of climate change?” “How strongly
do youagree climate change will impact future generations?”
(Christensen and Knezek, 2015). is indicates that readers
already report highly on pro-climate attitudes, and hence the
story may not be tested against a population that are climate
change skeptics. Indeed as seen in Figure 6, the number of
participants over 50in our study was low, reecting the relative
lack of anti-climate change viewpoints in our study.
Results: Qualitative
Reactions to data comics: When asking about the story based
questions (including individual reactions to specic story plots,
graphs, the decisions of characters, future development of stories
etc.), participants obtained a better understanding based on
visual attributes of the data (including visual symbols, colors,
shapes and sizes). In particular, they mentioned the benets of
data visuals for adding credibility and acceptability to narrations
in comics.
e smaller youare, the less yougive and should take.”—P3
e graph is simple, but it adds credibility to the
comic.”—P14
“Food given based on how much each person will contribute to
CO2 emission, so they are trying to minimize emission.—P17
Easy to understand. e shapes of the circles are in dierent
sizes depending on the person, and that's the amount of
resources they should get in "box quantities.”—P18
e rst graph supports Sonia's statement that weather has been
unpredictable, but also shows a level increase in the amount of
rainfall. e second image shows how the weather patterns
shown in the rst image have developed into storms.”—P44
However, some participants may reconsider the rationality of
stories based on the accuracy of data shown in comics. us,
designers should bemore cautious in selecting and presenting
reliable and scientic data in the storytelling context if they are used
to persuading traditional argument strategies. For instance, several
responses queried the fairness of the distribution plan shown in the
graph based on personal understanding and reection.
e gures don't involve any specic gender.”—P36
ey use pseudo science environmental charts.”—P33
Not very scientic.”—P44
FIGURE8
Quantitative results from survey on 1–7 Likert scale shown as heatmap to show the variation in the data. Questions same as in Figure6.
TABLE1 Descriptive statistics for Likert scores for each survey question as asked in Figure6.
Survey question Mean Median Variance IQR
Sonia Resource 4.30 4 1.57 2
Sonia Planning 5.60 6 1.91 2
New Revolia Resource 4.90 5 2.16 2
New Revolia Sharing 5.53 6 2.42 2
Data Leads to Understanding 5.62 6 1.53 2
Encouraged to Learn 5.22 5 1.53 2
Data Leads to Interest 4.93 5 1.76 2
LC et al. 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.893181
Frontiers in Psychology 10 frontiersin.org
ese comments show that readers understand the data parts
of the comic are not scientic, but are designed for the narratives
of the story. us the data visual is deemed ctional, since they
emanate from hypothetical scenarios that extrapolate based on
current climate change understanding.
Personal perceptions about climate action purpose: Responses
from participants who already have good climate awareness
suggested that data comics is a more engaging and provoking form
for viewers (P44: “I amalready well informed on the subject but it
denitely engaged my interest and I found it very thought
provoking”). However, several participants mentioned that data
may become exaggerated and ctitious during the process of
visualization (P6: “e data in the comics is more ctional than the
scientic data”; P8: “e comic maybe present some exaggeration
due to impact in the viewer, and also add some color and shapes”).
Although participants may feel confused about the accuracy of
data in comics and ctional stories, they still preferred data comics
as a creative climate change communication (P14: “e data from
the comic is very generalized and imprecise, but it is expressive and
attracts the reader’s attention”).
Limitations of data comics: Based on the analysis of
participants’ willingness to adopt pro-climate change actions, a
limitation of data comics was the length of stories. Participants
emphasized the signicance of the length of story lines which can
make audiences immersive in the story’s environment.
“e comics were too short to provoke a catarsis.” -P16
" … longer story lines to take one on a journey." -P10
On the other hand, participants also pointed out that they
realized the urgency of climate change not only from reading these
climate action comics (P36: “Not from the comic alone”). To
further support the eectiveness of data visuals in climate comics,
designers should think more about the connections between
narrations and specic situations in reality which may enable
users to take pro-climate change behaviors (P14: “It is important
to show specic situations with which the reader can identify and
imagine himself in the future”).
Discussion
To verify the validity of data visuals in combination with design
ction for the implicit inuence of climate change communication,
weexplored how speculative data comics can bedesigned to enable
climate change awareness and potentially nudge audiences to take
pro-environmental behaviors in a visually appealing and intelligible
way. Wedesigned and distributed a comic magazine that has the
covert purpose of climate action without advertising itself as about
climate change, the narrative contents of the comics are designed
for positive persuasion rather than showing negative facts. Wethen
evaluated the way the comic stories which presented human
phenomena can inform readers in regards to goals and motivations
as opposed to resource and policy data. Quantitative data showed
that participants were more likely to focus on the theme of future-
thinking in a story as opposed to physical issues like resource
limitations. In the qualitative data, several participants felt confused
about the rationality and accuracy of data comics and ctional
stories, highlighting the understanding of the narrative component
of the story rather than the scientic data. Although the ndings
cannot support that climate storytelling is more persuasive than
communicating evidence, it shows comics are more attractive and
understandable. is provides implications for designing stories in
the future: providing implicit cues for understanding alignment
with climate action rather than explicit arguments as they appear
to bemore receptive by audiences. In general, readers reported
positive inuences in climate awareness and alignment with
positive climate action goals.
However, regarding the majority of our participants reported
having a pro-environment perspective, our study demonstrates
that speculative data comics let people with pre-existing
environmental attitudes have more possibilities to activate
pro-environmental behavior. is suggests that to better evaluate
our design, weshould look for groups more antagonistic and from
more nations to climate action to better evaluate the implicit
eects of narratives and speculative data on climate change
attitudes, because government policies, green economy levels and
climate change educational eorts in dierent countries still
impact the formation of public attitudes about environmental
issues. ese further insights would provide better design
strategies for both data visuals and story design for particularly
needed groups to change pre-existing attitudes before they are
xed completely such as climate change deniers.
Conclusion
Speculative data comics with positive and implicit messages
have the potential for reducing the sense of distance between
climate change and the public. Comics are a more accessible,
understable, and memorable way of climate communication for
the general public. Our work introduced a novel design strategy
directed at inuencing the audiences motivations and goals in
alignment with climate action, as opposed to education in regards
to the facts in climate issues. Werecognize the diculty in making
long-term changes in opinion, and the even greater diculty in
measuring the long-term eects of these changes. However,
we believe that design strategies for climate communication
exemplied here provide an implicit inuence that may, in the
long run, have an impact on human perceptions and actions in the
climate change debate.
Data availability statement
e raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will
bemade available by the authors, without undue reservation.
LC et al. 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.893181
Frontiers in Psychology 11 frontiersin.org
Ethics statement
e studies involving human participants were reviewed and
approved by City University of Hong Kong. e patients/
participants provided their written informed consent to participate
in this study.
Author contributions
RL, ZS, and YS created the stories and the drawings. RL, CY,
and ZS created the gures. RL, CY, YS, and ZS wrote the
manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved
the submitted version.
Funding
e research has been partly supported by the Kyoto Design
Lab Researcher in Residence program.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the organizers of Data Art for Climate
Action conference for holding the associated exhibition where the
works were shown.
Conflict of interest
e authors declare that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or nancial relationships that could
beconstrued as a potential conict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors
and do not necessarily represent those of their aliated organizations,
or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product
that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its
manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
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